Posted on July 18th, 2013

Jonah Goldberg on the leftist religion of the state:

JFK’s inaugural opened the decade with the proclamation that America was the agent of God and the possessor of godlike powers: “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” The sociologist Robert Bellah found proof in this address that America already had a civil religion, defined by “the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.” The New York Times’s C. L. Sulzberger wrote that the inaugural appealed to anybody who believed there was “still room on this earth for the kingdom of heaven.”

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Kindle Locations 4011-4016)